The Disaster Artist

by Greg Sestero

  “He did.”

  “Just checking.”

  Now came time to shoot the scene in which Johnny crosses the living room to set up the phone-tap tape recorder, which for some reason had already been placed in a nook beneath Johnny’s end table.

  Sandy made the mistake of telling Tommy to be cautious not to hit his head on the way down the stairs, which meant that his first ten takes coming down had all the briskness and surety of a grandmother carrying a Ming vase. When they finally got a somewhat usable take of Tommy coming down the stairs, he had to be told to continue walking across the room to the phone, at which point Tommy started making what the crew instantly designated The Face. I knew The Face for what it really was: Blue Steel. Tommy has always been fascinated with models and pretty clearly believes he should be one. In fact, earlier that day, before everything went crazy and Carolyn fainted, I saw him looking at a Calvin Klein ad in GQ while getting his second round of makeup done. “You think I could do the modeling?” he asked me, holding the magazine out.

  I wasn’t sure how honest he wanted me to be. “Sure, why not,” I said.

  Tommy spent the rest of his time in the makeup chair going from studying the Calvin Klein ad to pursing his lips in the mirror.

  Let’s explore Tommy’s decision to Blue Steel at this particular moment in the story. Johnny has just learned that his future wife is cheating on him. He’s devastated and upset, presumably. This was Johnny’s time for sobriety and doubt. It was not his time to explode with sexuality.

  “What’s with the duck-lip thing he’s doing?” someone asked quietly, as Tommy vamped his way across the room. “What the hell is he doing?”

  Simple. Tommy decided to have Johnny respond to the shattering news that his future wife is banging another guy with some Blue Steel. Later in the day, during close-up shots for Tommy’s actual assembly of his tape-recorder wiretap, he gave the most incredible Blue Steel I think I’ve ever seen. Graham, and the people he’d brought in, were stupefied at this point. It was as though they’d been called in to do a simple nature film and found themselves confronted with the Loch Ness Monster.

  Getting Tommy back across the room and up the stairs was the most difficult portion of this sequence. Sandy had to talk him through the entire thing. When Tommy looked back at the tape recorder triumphantly, nodding in amazed self-admiration at the genius of his wiretap, Sandy said, “Why are you looking back? Keep going! Don’t look back!” Tommy reached the stairs and climbed them at such a glacial pace, it looked as if Johnny had never been in his own house before.

  When Tommy finished, he clearly thought that he’d just delivered a master class in dramatic acting. He approached me, smiling. “You think you can do it,” he said, “and I can’t, huh? Don’t worry, but I may be a model, too. I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll try it. Maybe do underwear modeling. Maybe design my own underwear. What about that?”

  I didn’t point out to him that Juliette and Carolyn managed to film their conversation in less time than it took to film Tommy walking across a room—and that included the time it took Carolyn to visit and return from the hospital.

  • • •

  Graham and his crew shot for several more days in the punishing heat of Johnny and Lisa’s condo set. Among the scenes they filmed were the master shots of a conversation shared by Johnny and Peter, Johnny’s psychologist friend, in which Johnny admits that Lisa has not been loyal to him. As usual, it took Tommy an entire afternoon to get a few clean takes, and Graham was getting less and less patient with him. Graham was particularly unhappy with the moment in which Johnny says, “You know what they say. Love is blind.” The best take they had of that line was all mumbly and garbled, and it needed to be done again. Tommy saw this as an opportunity to earn his Oscar. He buttonholed Sandy and said, “Listen, this is very important scene. I want camera very close on my face. Very close. So you can see the eyes. This is dramatic scene for the character.”

  Sandy was so beaten down by this point that if Tommy had come to him and said, “I want to shoot this scene with unicorns in the background,” Sandy would have said, “Yeah, sure. Sounds great.”

  Graham didn’t like the sound of this close-up business, and liked it even less after looking at some of the test shots. “I don’t know, Tommy. It’s kind of scaring me. You look a little . . . possessed.”

  Tommy, though, was bothered by something else in the test shots. “Makeup artist!” he said, turning from the monitor. “I need you here. Look at this scene. I don’t want to have the lines on my face. See? What is this thing on my face?”

  Amy, the makeup artist, looked at him. I’m pretty sure she wanted to say, “That’s called reality, Tommy.”

  “I don’t like this puffy stuff,” he said, touching the area under his eyes. She got him into the makeup chair and went to work getting rid of the puffy stuff. “Don’t pull down on my face!” Tommy said, jerking. “Be gentle, my God.” She rolled her eyes and kept doing exactly what she was doing. “Okay. Thank you. More powder now. More powder, please.”

  Tommy getting “depuffified.”

  Kyle Vogt, who was playing Peter the psychologist, approached Tommy during this depuffification session. He’d made it very clear to Tommy when he was hired months ago that he had a commitment to another project that had priority over The Room. Tommy had assured Kyle that The Room would wrap before Kyle’s other project began. Kyle’s project was on the eve of starting, and his scenes in The Room were not anywhere close to being finished.

  “Tommy,” Kyle said, “I have to tell you that this is probably going to be my last scene. I can’t work any more on this because of my other commitment.”

  Tommy’s eyes were closed while the makeup artist powdered him. Now they popped open, like those of a sleeping dragon whose treasure had been snatched. In the original script, Peter was one of The Room’s most prominent characters, with more scenes than, say, Claudette.

  “Why,” Tommy said to Kyle, “do you try to ruin my project? This is unacceptable.” He was going for hard-hearted menace here, but that proved impossible to pull off when someone was dabbing his face with a small foam cube covered in powder.

  Kyle held his ground. “Tommy, I told you about this. You knew about this months ago.”

  Tommy sat there, sneering and breathing. “You know what,” he said, after a moment, “that’s fine, you leave, don’t come back. We don’t need you anyway. It’s your loss—you and your stupid Warner Bros. They spit on you at Warner Bros.”

  The project Kyle was leaving for was, in fact, an indie film. Kyle had never said anything about going to do a film for Warner Bros. He worked for Warner Music, though, which a confused Tommy had obviously latched onto. Kyle tried to make things right with Tommy, using reason, but Tommy just sank into silent, powdery sullenness. Eventually Kyle left him alone.

  Kyle, like most of us, saw The Room as a vanity project intended to promote Tommy and Tommy alone. By this point, he didn’t think the film would get finished. It all must have felt very silly to Kyle, especially considering that his previous job was working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Lab.

  Whatever the case, he and Tommy now had to act together. Kyle was obviously upset and off his game, and while blocking the scene he smacked his head hard against one of the spiral staircase’s low-jutting stairs. Blood gushed from his head, which caused Tommy to panic once again. Many people have wondered why Kyle blinks so much during this scene, and why he reaches out to touch so many props. The explanation is that he had a concussion and his depth perception was a mess. It’s impressive that he was able to perform at all. He does not, however, make a very convincing psychologist.

  Tommy claimed to be fascinated by psychology. He once mentioned having seen a psychologist or psychiatrist—he had no idea there was any difference between the two—and suggested it had been a positive experience. He supposedly studied psychology at Laney College and had the relevant textbooks stacked up in his messy apartment, but whether he had actually rea
d any of them, I have no idea. It’s worth pointing out that Peter’s psychologist wisdom to Johnny ranges from cliché (“People are people”) to obvious (“This is Lisa we’re talking about?”) to terrible (“If you love her, you should confront her”). Peter is one of the most oddly inconsistent characters in The Room: his firm and resolute opinions on Lisa change completely depending on which scene he’s in. At one moment, he can’t believe a woman as saintly as Lisa would ever cheat; minutes later he calls her a “sociopath.”

  Watching Tommy perform this scene, I wondered what his psychologist or psychiatrist had made of him. I tried to imagine Tommy’s mind from the inside out. I saw burning forests, blind alleys, volcanoes in the desert, city streets that plunged into the ocean, barricades everywhere, and all of it lit in the deep-cherry light of emergency.

  • • •

  Graham was growing increasingly upset. The production had needed a generator for weeks now, because every time a piece of equipment ran out of juice, everyone had to wait for its operator to plug it in and recharge. If Tommy had had a generator on set, they could have filmed to their heart’s delirious content. The production was losing hours every day due to the lack of a generator, which could be rented for around $200 a day. But the man who was spending half a million dollars shooting an HD film he wasn’t going to use could not be bothered with such a peasant’s expense. Graham had been asking for a generator daily and Tommy kept telling him he’d work on it.

  During the Peter-Johnny scene, everything began to weigh on Graham: the heat, Tommy’s flubbed lines, Kyle’s excessive blinking, the way the water sounded when Johnny poured it into a glass. He seemed to be losing his mind a little. I think what was actually happening was that he was beginning to understand what it meant that his name was going to be attached to this film. I knew the feeling.

  “Let’s shoot something outside,” he said to Tommy and Sandy after the Peter scene was finished. “Let’s get out of this set. It’s too hot and I’m going nuts with claustrophobia.”

  Sandy suggested shooting the rooftop party scene, which takes place near the end of the film. A night shoot, he said, might be nice. Tommy, though, wanted to shoot something else, something inside. Graham made him a deal: If Tommy got a generator, they could shoot inside again, just as Tommy wanted. Tommy agreed. Graham gave him the number of two good generator places, and Tommy said he’d call.

  After a long weekend break, Tommy pulled into the Birns & Sawyer lot to find Graham sitting on an apple box by the Rooftop. Tommy had come on his own, quite tardy of course, saying he had had a “dailies meeting with producers.” Graham’s crew was there, too, waiting with him. Tommy was supposed to have called about a generator, but I knew he hadn’t. Tommy got out of his car, looking agitated, and walked toward Graham, who didn’t stand. A box filled with paint towels and paint cans was at Graham’s feet.

  “Why sitting, not working?” Tommy asked.

  “Where’s the generator?” Graham replied.

  Tommy explained that he’d called Graham’s generator people. Unfortunately, they had no generator available at this time.

  Graham nodded. He looked exhausted and frustrated—nothing like he had a couple of weeks ago. It was like someone had replaced his young, happy eyes with those of a miserable old crone. Even his hairline looked less robust. It was terribly depressing to be confronted with this good man’s emotional and physical degeneration. He’d been such a fun, wry, amusing person to have around the set at first. His problem was that he wanted to make something he was proud of.

  Tommy looked around at Graham’s loafing, glowering crew and said, “Why is everyone sitting down? Let’s move it, come on, let’s get going!”

  “I need a generator,” Graham said, still sitting. He was no longer looking at Tommy. “This day, like all the others, will be hell with no generator.”

  Tommy stopped and fixed upon Graham a long stare of intense disapproval. “Well, I’m sorry. Generator is not available at this time. I cannot create it for you here. I can’t make it out of nothing.”

  Again Graham nodded. “You never called.”

  “Oh yes I did call.”

  “No, you didn’t. I called them, and they never received a call from you. They told me they had plenty available. You’re a liar, Tommy.”

  “No,” Tommy said. “You liar yourself! We call. They say unavailable. So do your job, okay?”

  “Do my job.” Graham played with the words as though they were little gobs of dough and he was still deciding what to make with them. “How about you do your job?”

  Tommy began to walk away. Suddenly he turned around and pointed his finger at Graham. “Listen to me, young man! It’s not my problem. I need to prepare for acting, okay? I don’t want to hear your problem.”

  Graham grabbed a paint towel from the box at his feet and stood with righteous fury. “Tommy,” he said. Tommy turned and Graham marched up to him and threw the paint towel at Tommy’s feet. This was far more dramatic than it sounds. It looked as grave an insult as some seventeenth-century Frenchman slapping another with a white glove. He stuck his finger in Tommy’s face. “You’re a fucking liar, Tommy. You’re a fucking liar.”

  Peter Anway heard the ruckus and came out immediately.

  “Don’t raise your voice on me!” Tommy said, pointing his own finger in Graham’s face.

  Graham knocked it away. “You know what? I fucking quit! You’re a fucking liar, Tommy! I quit!” Graham turned and stormed away. He motioned to his crew, who all snapped into action as though Graham were Toulon and they were his puppets.

  Tommy had never been confronted in this way before. He’d been yelled at, but not like this. Throughout the filming of The Room, Graham was the only person to directly call Tommy out for his lying.

  Tommy walked after Graham as he and his crew left. “Keep going, you sissy guy,” Tommy said. “You sissy faggot! Keep going! Learn how to walk!”

  Graham, to his credit, didn’t turn and didn’t acknowledge Tommy’s insults. He and his crew were gone quickly. Tommy seemed to be hyperventilating, out of his mind. I’ve never heard the word sissy more times than I did in the next minute. This was some of the ugliest on-set behavior I’d ever seen from Tommy. It was despicable. There was no other word for it. He looked like a damaged wraith. He’d clearly lied, and he’d just as clearly been busted for it. It was as if he wanted to sabotage his own project—and Graham’s sin was simply responding to Tommy like most of us wanted to.

  “You see how these people are?” he shouted. “They’re monsters! Pricks! I give them job and they don’t appreciate damn thing.”

  Tommy could tell I was appalled by him. He could lie to himself all he wanted, but he couldn’t keep lying to everyone else. How was it that he never seemed to feel any guilt? What kind of a person could do that?

  I wanted this episode to end. I wanted the film to be finished. I was actually still rooting for that at this point, because I couldn’t bear the thought of so many people working so hard for nothing. “Stop, Tommy,” I said. “Enough.”

  He didn’t stop. He was pacing back and forth, snarling and muttering to himself: “They want me to spend money, they want to take my money, they try to ruin my project.”

  Everyone who didn’t quit went home for the day—except for one person. A guy who’d been working the cameras—a guy, importantly, who didn’t much care for Graham—now approached Tommy in the Birns & Sawyer parking lot. He was tall, with short, sun-bleached hair and a very laid-back manner. I pegged him as a former surfer now using the onset of his late thirties as motivation to get more professional. “Hey, Tommy,” Todd Barron said. “I can be your DP.”

  Tommy turned and looked at him.

  “I’ll run it. I’ll light the set. I’ll do the camera. Just pay me a couple hundred bucks a day. Joe, my camera guy, will stay on with me, too.”

  Tommy hired Todd Barron on the spot. “Now,” Tommy said, “we see how good you are.”

  twelve

&nb
sp; I’m Not Waiting for Hollywood

  You can change the people, change the scenery, but you can’t change your own rotten self.

  —Tom Ripley, The Talented Mr. Ripley

  After Tommy’s meltdown in the car, weeks went by before I spoke to him again. When we finally did connect he apologized several times for losing control. Although he was still planning his move to L.A., he assured me that I could remain in the apartment. “I don’t force you to live there,” he said, “but it’s your house, too.” Thanks to what Tommy described as “issue” with Street Fashions, his imminent arrival kept getting postponed. The delays were fine by me. I’d been scanning the classifieds for apartments in my price range: an exercise in despair.

  Around Christmastime I went up to the Bay Area to visit my family for the holidays. As soon as I got there, my feelings of melancholy and doubt about my future almost overwhelmed me. I pondered my options in the face of my dwindling savings and lack of income. I could afford a few more months in Tommy’s apartment but barely a month elsewhere. So that was it, then: If I wanted to stick it out in L.A., I needed to get a job as quickly as possible and endure living with Tommy until I saved up enough to move out.

  • • •

  After Christmas, Tommy called me at my folks’ place and said he was going to spend his New Year’s Eve at the base of the Hollywood sign. I told him that sounded very interesting. Tommy then surprised me by announcing that he’d already moved to Los Angeles. He was, in fact, living in the apartment right now.

  “Wait,” I said. “What?”

  “Oh,” Tommy said. “It’s very simple. At midnight, I am going to yell, ‘Tommy Wiseau is here! I will take over the Hollywood! Year 2000 is my year!’ ”

  “Not the sign thing,” I said. “You moved to L.A.?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is my time.”